Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is imposing the first US rules on CO2. I thought I’d take a look at the EPA’s own estimates of cost and benefit of CO2 regulation, to see if the new rules make sense.
Figure 1. Danger, high costs ahead. Photo Source
There’s two numbers of interest – how much will it cost to reduce CO2 emissions, and how much will the decreased CO2 reduce the temperature?
First, the cost … truth is, no one knows. These things are hard to estimate. I took the EPA figures. They say that the new regulations will cost US$78 billion per year. Considering that’s only a tenth of the size of the recent “Stimulus”, that doesn’t seem like too much. Other analysts have put larger numbers on the cost, but I’ll take the EPA’s low estimate.
And how much will it reduce the temperature?
Again, no one knows … so I’ll take the EPA figures from the same source. They say
Based on the reanalysis the results for projected atmospheric CO2 concentrations are estimated to be reduced by an average of 2.9 ppm (previously 3.0 ppm), global mean temperature is estimated to be reduced by 0.006 to 0.0015 °C by 2100.
Whoa, be still my beating heart. I’ll take their average estimate, 0.00375°C (about four thousandths) of a degree cooling by 2100.
OK, now to run the numbers:
Total Cost = US$78 billion per year times 90 years = US$7 trillion dollars with a “t”, or about half a years GDP for the US.
Total Cooling = 0.00375° C in 90 years
That gets us to where we can make the final calculation …
US$7 trillion divided by 0.00375°C gives us … wait for it …
US$1,900 trillion dollars for each measly degree of cooling.
I’ve heard of air conditioners that were expensive to run, but that’s gotta take the cake, almost two quadrillion dollars running cost per degree of cooling …
The usual explanation is that this is because only the US is involved, and if the rest of the world got with the picture everything would be fine.
However, the cost per degree will not change based on the number of countries involved. It’s still almost two quadrillion ($1,900,000,000,000,000) bucks per degree. So that explanation won’t wash. And although the US economy might be able to take the hit, poorer countries like China and India won’t do well. Finally, those are EPA estimates, the cost may well be higher. Government estimates of the costs of their own programs are notoriously way below what they actually turn out costing.
In any case, my question is, given that the EPA says that cooling costs two quadrillion dollars per degree … how much cooling would you suggest we buy at that price?
Regards to all,
w.
PS – How big is a trillion? Almost unimaginably big. We think a million dollars is big money, and it is. Suppose my family had started a business in the year zero, a couple thousand years ago. Suppose we ran the business like a government, and we lost a million dollars.
To make it more like a government, let’s make my losses a million dollars a day.
Suppose I lost a million dollars a day, every day for the last 2,011 years. Generation after generation of the family, call it three generations per century, reaching down sixty generations. And every one of them, for their entire lives, losing a million dollars a day.
If we had done that, lost a million dollars a day, every single day since Biblical times, not taking a single day off, we still wouldn’t have lost a trillion dollars. We wouldn’t even have reached three-quarters of a trillion dollars.
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but you forgot to offset all the costs with green job income
Cost/Benefit is way out of wack with this approach. We could go the X-Prize route for a scale-able Thorium based electrical generation process to move us beyond this debate. Make the inventor(s) a hero and a billionaire. No goverment investment other than patients.
Willis & David –
I’ll respond later – tied up at the moment.
Best,
A. Capitalist;
Workable, except I wonder where the government will get all the patients to invest. Will they empty the loony bins? What will be done with them?
Answer quickly, pls; I’m running out of patience.
:pPpP
Willis & Dan:
The problem with Willis’ analysis is that he compares the benefits of the EPA’s Tailpipe Rule with the avoided costs of the Tailoring Rule.
To compare costs and benefits you have to compare actual or projected costs of compliance, not the avoided costs. The figure you used for costs was the figure for the costs EPA claims are “avoided” by the “regulatory relief” afforded by the Tailoring Rule. If you were to compare the benefits of the Tailpipe Rule to the costs imposed – rather than avoided – by the Tailoring Rule, that would make more sense.
Some context:
EPA has issued a suite of GHG rules consisting of:
1. The Endangerment Finding;
2. The Triggering Rule;
3. The Tailpipe Rule; and
4. The Tailoring Rule.
The Endangerment Finding says human emissions of GHGs, mainly CO2, endanger human health and welfare. Under the Clean Air Act, the effect of this is to require regulation of GHG emissions from motor vehicles.
The Triggering Rule says that any regulation of GHGs under the motor vehicle portion of the Clean Air Act triggers regulation of GHGs under the stationary source portions of the Clean Air Act.
The Tailpipe Rule Regulates GHG emissions from light duty vehicles, and claims to thereby avoid warming of the astounding sum of .006 to .015 C.
The Tailoring Rule says:
1. Stationary source emissions of GHGs are regulated under the Clean Air Act because under the Triggering Rule, the Tailpipe Rule triggers regulation of stationary sources.
2. The Clean Air Act has statutory thresholds for regulation of “major [stationary] sources” at 100 tons per year and 250 tons per year.
3. Regulating CO2 under these statutory thresholds would be absurd and impossible because the number of sources that would be subject to regulation would overwhelm and paralyze the permitting processes and cost a bazillion dollars.
4. Therefore, we, the agency, on our own, are going raise the statutory thresholds to a level that we think will be administratively feasible, 100,000 tons per year.
5. Raising the statutory thresholds constitutes “regulatory relief” as compared to requiring compliance with the statute as written.
6. The costs that are saved – avoided – by this “regulatory relief” are $70 billion.
7. Since this is “regulatory relief,” i.e. a relaxation of an emissions standard, there is no correlative environmental “benefit” in terms of reduced GHG emissions and avoided temperature increases; there is only an environmental cost of the relaxation of the emissions standard, which they say is not too high.
8. Since no environmental benefit is claimed by EPA to result from the Tailoring Rule, there can be no analysis of the costs of those benefits. Instead, they reverse the analysis, and determine if the financial and administrative benefits of regulatory relief are worth the environmental costs. As far as I know they say this with a straight face, though I do not see how.
This is all completely nuts, backwards, upside down and blatantly illegal. The Agency cannot rewrite laws passed by Congress and signed by the President. You need another law passed by Congress and signed by the President to do that. Any fool knows that.
EPA refused to consider the costs and benefits of their overall policy.
They did this because the costs are gargantuan, and the benefits imperceptible and to acknowledge that fact would be too much even for them.
So I will amend my previous statement to say that I agree with you 100% that the costs of EPA’s GHG folly are ludicrously high and the benefits purely imaginary. The benefits are so small they can only be calculated – if you accept their contentions about the effect of human emissions of CO2 on global average temp – but they cannot be detected by the state of the art in measurement of global average surface temperature.
Where I differ is how you demonstrated your point. The “avoided” costs are not appropriate for the cost-benefit analysis. The incurred costs should be used instead.
Best regards.
It might be worth noting to your readers that the linked article is not an EPA document, but rather a Republican Party document (more specifically United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Minority Staff) that quotes EPA documents with minimal context. The “0.006 to 0.0015 °C by 2100” estimate is at least partially in context in the linked article, but not by a long shot in your post. That estimate is of “the impacts on global temperatures of the agency’s mobile source rule” and NOT of the entire set of Clean Air Act regulations. Mobile sources make up about one-third of human CO2 sources in the US. Given the lack of a number for the drop in CO2 and warming due to regulations on other sources, the cost estimates here are meaningless.
It’s also unclear where the cost estimate comes from or what it takes into consideration. Does it consider the potential benefits of innovation, increased demand for jobs, or improvement in and savings in national security with increased energy self-sufficiency?
Someone here raised the point that he didn’t see any reason increased temperatures were a net negative. Well, for you it might not be so bad if you are already fairly well off, don’t live in any low lying areas, areas prone to hurricane, or areas prone to drought. However most of the rest of the world will get hammered, and it is happening, though not nearly as bad as it’s going to get.
Todd Gillette says:
March 17, 2011 at 1:54 pm
Y’know, I figure that my readers, just like you, can actually click on a link and see the source. And since I put the link right there, and they can click it, they generally assume that I’m not trying to hide anything from them. It’s called a “citation”. You might try it some time.
Gosh. From the sound of your desired corrections, my estimate might be as much as ten times too high. It might only be $200 trillion dollars instead of $2,000 trillion. I feel so much better now.
Here’s another data point. The Kyoto Protocol costs have been estimated at $300 billion per year across all countries, and it’s been claimed by Tom Wigley at UCAR, a Kyoto proponent, that after 15 years it would cool the earth by 0.06°C. That gives us a cost of only $75 trillion per degree, a real bargain, and the same order of magnitude as your EPA number.
Unfortunately, none of that changes the fact that it would still be insanely costly per degree … or it would be if the temperature had in fact dropped by 0.06°C. Since that’s way too small to measure, we don’t know if we got anything for our money at all. Perhaps you are happy spending trillions to achieve a result so tiny it is unmeasurable … I’m not.
Remember what I said at the start regarding the costs? I said “No one knows”. If you have better numbers, bring them out. Be aware, however, that whatever numbers you choose, someone just like you will show up to tell you that you’ve used the wrong numbers.
The globe has been generally warming over the last half century, yet hurricanes haven’t increased. Undeterred by the facts, you want to try to scare us with hurricanes?
The globe has been generally warming over the last half century, yet sea level rise shows no sign of accelerating, and in fact is slowing down lately. Undeterred by the facts, you want to try to scare us with the sea level?
The globe has been generally warming over the last half century, yet droughts show no sign of increasing. Indeed, historical records show that droughts are more common during colder periods. Undeterred by the facts, you want to try to scare us with the droughts?
Indeed, the globe has been generally warming for the last three centuries without any climate refugees or increase in North Atlantic storms or anything at all.
I’d advise you to take your frightener act to a place where it has a chance of actually scaring people. You might start with your local grade school, because high schoolers probably won’t buy it, they’re pretty sophisticated these days. Because around here, your unsupported claims that we’ll be “hammered”, and your handwaving that “it is happening”, they won’t bring heart-quaking fear of Thermageddon™ as you’d like. Instead, they’ll bring laughter … and I assure you that folks are not laughing with you …
w.
Quinn the Eskimo says:
March 15, 2011 at 7:40 pm (Edit)
You’re right, Quinn, thanks. But I didn’t mess with trying to get exact numbers because 1) there aren’t any, we’ve never done it before, there’s just lots of guesses, and 2) no matter what numbers you choose, the cost/benefit analysis is a joke where “the costs are gargantuan, and the benefits imperceptible” , and 3) no matter what numbers I used, someone would be unhappy with them and would give me lots of reasons why.
Given that, it wasn’t worth the candle to get more accurate.
w.
The document you link to got the numbers wrong. The original document (Light-Duty Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Emission Standards and Corporate
Average Fuel Economy Standards) states:
“Based on these reductions, EPA modeled the anticipated potential effect on climate change and found that in year 2100, the rule would reduce temperature increases by 0.006-0.015 degrees Celsius, and the reduction in sea-level rise would be 0.06-0.14 centimeters.”
Another pertinent point: if you actually read the full original quote (pretty difficult because the citation here/in the Senate minority document is wrong – just as well it wasn’t the IPCC, I guess) it says that the EPA modelled the impact of the measures “over the lifetime of MY2012-2016”, which if I’m not mistaken means that the total cost is not 90 * $78bn, but 5 * $78bn.
A good citation says somewhere what is actually being cited. Your post says ” I took the EPA figures.” linking to something that is NOT an EPA document, and worse you take those figures out of context even from what is in the cited document. Say what you will about my “frightener act”, you’re the one hosting a blog and posting misleading and poorly developed information, you’ve been alerted to the mistake, and you haven’t updated the blog post. That is irresponsible and dishonest.
You and your readers can read some scientific reports regarding the impacts of warming from the US Climate Change Science Program here: http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap3-3/final-report/
or check out realclimate.org for some primers on how climate change and the associated science works.
As for sea level rise, where do you get your figures from? Everywhere I look I see reports saying sea level rise is continuing right along. Maybe I’m misinterpreting your statement somehow.
http://www.climate.org/topics/sea-level/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise (with solid citations to the IPCC)
By the way, I did not mean to imply hurricanes are anticipated to become more frequent, rather they will become more powerful.
I’m all for cost-benefit analysis, having a good honest discussion, and producing an effective plan. However I won’t readily trust numbers about carbon reduction plans while politics is so manipulated by the oil and coal industries, who have been using the same tactics and even companies used by the tobacco companies to deny tobacco’s addictiveness and health effects: http://www.ucsusa.org/news/press_release/ExxonMobil-GlobalWarming-tobacco.html
Once deniers stop denying and start having an honest discussion, we can actually make some progress and choose a more viable course of action. As it stands, I’ve got no choice but to suppor the EPA in what I know to be a suboptimal plan, because it’s the only thing that our government is willing and able to do at the moment.
Willis, this post and some of the follow-up comments make several errors that should be addressed and corrected.
Several have already been pointed out to you. For example, as Quinn the Eskimo explained, the “costs” you used were actually costs avoided (thanks to the Tailoring Rule) rather than costs incurred. And as Todd Gillette pointed out, the “benefits” in your analysis were from a completely different rule (the Light-Duty Vehicle GHG and CAFE Standards), and misquoted at that. Your response to both was essentially that it doesn’t matter since it’s too hard to get exact numbers anyway. Granted, the numbers are estimates, but that’s no excuse for a fundamentally flawed methodology, is it?
So you ask others to provide a better cost-benefit analysis. No need to reinvent the wheel. I’ll describe two, both conducted by EPA and freely available on their website. (No need to rely on a Senate EPW Minority Staff report!)
First the Tailoring Rule: Quinn the Eskimo is correct that the costs and benefits are reversed for this rule. The rule enacts a relaxation of already existing permitting requirements. Since the requirements are relaxed, costs to industry are negative (that is, the rule saves them money), and benefits to the environment are also negative.
In the Regulatory Impact Analysis, EPA does not evaluate the environmental costs, citing uncertainty and complexity. However, the costs can be discussed qualitatively and are likely to be small because (a) the Tailoring Rule only excludes about 10% of stationary source GHG emissions from regulation; (b) “regulation” does not mean “control” in this case, and those excluded sources would probably not require much in the way of control anyway; and (c) regulatory compliance for the sources that remain covered will probably increase thanks to the simplification of requirements.
Though it did not calculate environmental costs, EPA did determine an economic benefit of >$387 billion over a five-year period. (I’m guessing this is where the EPW report got its figure of $78 billion that you used, though it’s impossible to tell because they provide no citation. Also, that total includes administration costs to state governments.)
Discussion Question: Which political party opposes a rule that saves industry (mostly small businesses), state governments, and taxpayers billions of dollars a year? Why?
Second is the Light-Duty Vehicle GHG Emissions Standards and CAFE Standards: Because this rule requires increased fuel efficiency, total costs to consumers is actually negative. Per vehicle cost of compliance is $948 for 2016 model year vehicles, with annual fuel savings of about $424, for a payback period of 2 years and 7 months (using 2007 dollars and a 3% discount rate). If you finance your car as most people do, “the fuel savings immediately outweigh the increased payments.” Lifetime discounted net savings is about 3 grand per vehicle. Total economic cost (NPV, 3%, 2007 dollars): −$1.2 trillion. (That’s a minus sign in front of that number; consumers will save over a trillion dollars thanks to this law.)
For the lifetime of the five model years initially affected, EPA estimates a reduction of just under a billion metric tons CO2EQ. Not counting fuel savings, cost of reductions is ~$50/ton. (Counting fuel savings, cost is negative.)
What about environmental benefits? Keep in mind that transportation accounts for ~16% of GHG emissions, and the US accounts for ~16% of global emissions, so this rule affects a small fraction of total emissions.. Keep in mind also that there are non-GHG environmental benefits that EPA discusses but I don’t. EPA used a range of estimates of the social cost of carbon (SCC) based on societal impacts of global warming to assign monetary values to GHG reductions.
NPV of emissions reductions for the first five model years ranges from 3 to 53 billion dollars (2007 dollars). NPV for the lifetime of the rule ranges from 34 to 538 billion dollars.
All told, this rule has a NPV benefit of 1.5 to 2 trillion dollars. This is pretty typical of environmental regulations.
One final point, related to your comment that government estimates of program costs are usually underestimated: At least regarding environmental regulations, the opposite is true. I refer you to two studies, one by the Economic Policy Institute and one by Resources for the Future.
Cheers!
Doug,
I’m sorry, but the EPA is not a credible source. Their figures are an invented fantasy used to push their agenda. The EPA’s numbers are no more honest than the government’s grossly inflated ridership projections and greatly underestimated cost for high speed rail.
Anyone who believes the EPA is going to benefit taxpayers by $1.5 – $2 trillion is extremely gullible. I couldn’t load your economic policy link, but your “Resources for the Future” link discusses safety regulations, which is nothing like the draconian EPA proposals, which are anyway based on the pseudo-science that CO2 is a pollutant. [That last link is obviously the work of government lobbyists. Check their address.]
There is no benefit to reducing CO2. None. There may be a benefit from mandating higher mileage standards, but it comes at the expense of personal freedom – a very bad trade-off because of the precedent it sets.
Using government police power to forcibly reduce a completely harmless and benign trace gas, when the BRIC countries and a hundred smaller countries are ramping up CO2 emissions is insane. It is selling snake oil to claim that it will save money, when in reality it would be a hugely expensive job destroyer and would raise the cost of all goods and services.
Stagflation, doubled and squared.
Doug says:
March 25, 2011 at 1:36 pm
Thanks, Doug. You raise several points. First, you are correct that this is the “tailoring” rule, and will save industry money. And you are correct that I used the wrong numbers. However, that implies that the actual costs will be much higher. How much higher? The EPA doesn’t say.
You say:
No, that wasn’t my response. My response was to acknowledge I was wrong, and to request for people to run the cost per degree of cooling themselves.
Since you have not taken me up on my offer, I have to assume that you’re more interested in arguing than in taking the discussion forwards. At least I couldn’t find any numbers for the total cost of the EPA CO2 rules per degree of cooling in what you cited, although I could have missed it.
What do you calculate the cost per degree to be? It’s hard to say, because EPA won’t or can’t say themselves. In fact, there’s a bill for that:
I don’t know what that cost will be, Doug. But it will not be small by any means, and for a hundredth of a degree or so of warming, whatever the cost is, it’s too high for me …
w.
Smokey says:
March 25, 2011 at 2:38 pm
Credible is as credible does. The Light-Duty Vehicle rule, for example, was published with over 1,000 pages of supporting documentation and was the result of a year-long open process. EPA’s summary and response to public comments was in itself over 800 pages long. As Willis would no doubt agree, if you have problems with their data, don’t just complain — show how they were wrong and share your improvements.
Or is Willis’s admittedly flawed back-of-the-envelope calculation good enough for you?
??? Of the 25 case studies they reviewed, 15 were environmental rules, eight were OSHA rules, and two were for traffic congestion.
I’m not familiar with the group myself, but from their website:
Back to Smokey:
Ahh, a threat to personal freedom! Just like every other law ever created. What if I really, really want to get drunk and drive my Hummer with a flame-thrower attached through the local orphanage?
You know, some threats to your personal freedom come from sources other than the government. Corporations, foreign countries, the Republican party, even your next-door neighbor would curtail your personal freedom if they could make a buck off it. (And believe me, they can and do.)
But what did our founding fathers do when they saw grave threats to their personal freedom? They wrote a law! They understood that sometimes laws are necessary to “secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Blessings like the liberty to breathe clean air or drink clean water.
And what personal freedom are you fighting for exactly? The right to pay more to own a car that emits more pollution?
This sems a bit off-topic, but since you brought it up, stagflation requires high inflation. Inflation in the US has been stable and low for decades. According to Wikipedia, one of the triggering events of the 1970s stagflation was the 1973 oil crisis. I don’t suppose this would convince you to support a rule that decreases our dependence on foreign oil? (Projected to save 1.8 billion barrels of oil!) Didn’t think so.
Willis Eschenbach says:
March 27, 2011 at 9:29 pm
If by “actual costs” you mean the costs that would have been incurred if EPA hadn’t passed the Tailoring Rule or the cost that could be incurred if Republicans get their way and repeal the Tailoring Rule, then yes, EPA does say exactly how much more it would cost. It’s right there in the RIA I linked to.
I apologize for putting words in your mouth! Not my intention.
Perish the thought! I thought I did a pretty decent job of discussing the costs/benefits of the two rules you blogged about. But I was long-winded, so let me try to sum up:
Tailoring Rule: This rule reduces the economic impact of an existing rule at the cost of increased GHG emissions (amount unknown). So asking for the cost per degree of cooling does not make sense for this rule.
Light-Duty Vehicle Rule: This rule reduces global mean temperature by 0.006 to 0.015°C by 2100 at a cost of −1.5 to −2 trillion US dollars (NPV, 2007 dollars). Cost per degree cooling: −100 to −250 trillion per °C. (Please don’t forget to include the minus sign when quoting me!)
If you really believe that, then you haven’t done enough research.
Doug,
If you believe the BLS inflation numbers, you probably have someone else doing your shopping for you. And with U-6 unemployment at almost 20%… it’s stagflation, my friend. The ‘doubled & squared’ part is in our future.
You say, “You know, some threats to your personal freedom come from sources other than the government. Corporations, foreign countries, the Republican party…”
I stopped at ‘Republican party.’ IANAR. But you’ve made it a partisan issue, so I’ll leave it at that.
Rather than argue with an apologist for the EPA’s spectacular pseudo-scientific labeling of the air you exhale as a “pollutant,” I’ll provide a timeline of what happened, and you can see for yourself that tens of thousands of skeptical scientists’ comments were arbitrarily disregarded and discarded by the EPA in their pre-ordained endangerment finding:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/07/29/epa-asking-for-input-on-co2
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/17/co2-epa-politics-and-all-that
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/04/20/making-your-opinion-on-co2-and-climate-change-known-to-the-epa
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/23/the-june-23rd-epa-co2-endangerment-public-comment-deadline-looms
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/24/the-epa-suppresses-dissent-and-opinion-and-apparently-decides-issues-in-advance-of-public-comment
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/27/released-the-censored-epa-document-final-report
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/09/epa-sends-co2-endangerment-finding-to-the-white-house
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/24/epa-co2-comment-deadline-for-cars-and-light-trucks-fast-approaching-get-your-comments-in-now
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/06/epa-about-to-declare-co2-dangerous-ssshhh-dont-tell-the-trees
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/29/epa-rejects-petitions-to-scuttle-co2-rules
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/02/a-banner-day-for-the-epa
There’s plenty more, Doug. But this should get you on the right track. And the comments are a major bonus, because unlike censoring echo chambers like realclimate, climate progress, etc., WUWT encourages comments from everyone. With the free exchange of ideas, the truth emerges: CO2 is not a pollutant, but a beneficial and harmless trace gas, essential for all life on earth, and the EPA’s corrupt decision was politics, not science.
Smokey, and those with a similar frame of mind, please do a teeny tiny amount of thinking before claiming that CO2 is a “a completely harmless and benign trace gas.” Trace amounts of many materials can kill you or cause major health issues. The question of whether CO2 is a pollutant or not is based on whether it negatively impacts our environment. Ignoring for the moment the impressive amount of research and agreement in the climate research community on the warming issue, CO2 is killing our oceans, particular coral reef ecosystems: http://www.bios.edu/Labs/co2lab/research/Coral.html or http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/03/090309162125.htm for a simpler news article. “We can say with a high degree of certainty that all of this CO2 will make the oceans more acidic – that is simple chemistry taught to freshman college students.”
And if you think the destruction of these ecosystems won’t affect you, just do a simple good search for coral reef benefits, and you’ll get plenty of informative articles.
Granted the jelly fish will enjoy the new warmer and acidic environment. Oh joy!
This alone should be enough to at least pick your head out of the sand and contemplate the possibility that there is not a worldwide cabal of climate scientists only interested in grant money. You are welcome to be a climate skeptic, but if you want to actually consider yourself such, please read the following article so you can know the difference between being a true skeptic and simply being a closed-minded denier:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/brin20100213/
And Willis, can you please edit this post so people don’t see the article, think it’s correct because they don’t bother to read it critically or read the extensive comments, and then link to it and misinform another whole group of people? Thanks 🙂
Todd Gilette says:
“Trace amounts of many materials can kill you or cause major health issues.”
Yes, and six inches of H2O can kill you, too.
CO2 has no effect on corals; the bleaching is completely natural, and is repaired by the next year. Do a search of the WUWT archives to learn all about it. Willis has written an excellent article on coral bleaching.
And CO2 does not make the oceans acidic. Do a search of the WUWT archives to learn the facts. The oceans have essentially infinite buffering capacity, and they have not become measurably more acidic due to the increase in the entirely benign trace gas CO2.
I would do the searches to decisively refute your belief system, but I’ve debunked it so often that it’s time you did your own homework. There is zero testable, empirical evidence showing that CO2 is a problem. It’s time you started to deal with that fact.
There is no empirical, testable evidence showing that CO2 has any effect at all on temperature. There is conjecture based on radiative physics, and CO2 may have a minuscule effect. Or not. But there is absolutely no real world evidence of runaway global warming due to CO2 [the debunked CO2=CAGW conjecture].
Provide verifiable, definitive evidence of global damage due to the increase in the trace gas CO2, and you will change my mind. But so far, there is no such evidence. The whole global warming belief system is based upon an evidence-free conjecture.
Smokey says:
March 28, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Just another government conspiracy I guess? But again, at least they show their work, and you’ve provided no alternative data. So what am I supposed to do? Just ignore the research because it doesn’t match what I want to believe?
That part was just a little joke. Sorry it didn’t translate well. One shouldn’t take politics too seriously, or at least political parties. They are all self-perpetuating organizations (not just the GOP).
If you exhale it, that’s because your body is trying to get rid of it. CO2 is a pollutant to your respiratory system. But that’s not why it was labeled a pollutant by EPA. It’s all a matter of context.
Thanks for all the links, but this very post is all the evidence I need of the quality of insight, research, and editorial oversight that this website flaunts and/or flouts.
Smokey says:
March 28, 2011 at 9:01 pm
All physics is conjecture.
Doug,
There is no way you could have read the links and comments I provided, indicating that your mind is made up and closed to new information. You’re a True Believer; rational discussion and evidence means nothing. OK, there are lots of believers around. After all, critical thinking takes effort. Easier to drink the Kool Aid, eh?
Next, the BLS doesn’t account for food and fuel, calling them “transients.” That is nothing but a gimmick to let the government pretend that inflation is low. It isn’t, as anyone who buys gasoline and eats knows. And unless you’re a public worker drone, any pay raises to keep up with rising inflation are scarce to non-existent: Stagflation.
Worldwide commodity prices have been skyrocketing for the past year. There were food riots in Mexico last year, and the riots in Egypt were started over high food prices. [although the Muslim Brotherhood expertly hijacked the unrest]. And the insanity of using 40% of our corn crop to make ethanol is raising food costs here. Are you blind? No, you’re simply a True Believer; your mind is made up and closed tight.
Facts mean nothing to you. You even believe that a minor trace gas, essential to all life on earth, is a “pollutant” based on an entirely political – not scientific – Orwellian misuse of the word.
Agricultural output increases in line with the rise in otherwise harmless CO2. But your cognitive dissonance is so strong that you will not even educate yourself by reading the relevant links provided. Your mind is made up and closed tight: “CO2, Ba-a-a-d. Starvation, Go-o-o-d.” The mantra of insanity, promoted by the eco-totalitarian wannabe crowd.
Finally, all physics is not conjecture; all physics begins with conjecture. To be generally accepted, it progresses through stages: Conjecture, Hypothesis, Theory and finally, Law, as in the law of gravity. It would help if you got your terms straight. This is the internet’s “Best Science” site. Scientific terms matter.
Doug, you sound like a government drone feeding at the public trough at the expense of everyone else. If so, you are a central part of the problem, not the solution. So tell us you’re not, please. I can accept someone being misguided a lot easier than I can accept someone with their hand in my back pocket, feeling around for my wallet.
Smokey says:
March 29, 2011 at 7:25 am
I didn’t think the moderators would approve a comment that is mostly name-calling and repetitive insults. Guess I was wrong.